The Google News Lab Fellowship is coming to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland
A few weeks ago, our 2016 American and Australian Google News Lab Fellows visited Google Headquarters in Mountain View to get to know the Google News Lab — and each other — a little better. Since we launched the Fellowship last year, we’ve been getting requests to bring the program to other parts of the world. Today, we are excited to announce that the Google News Lab Fellowship is coming to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
In Europe, this will be the second Google News Lab Fellowship after we launched the program in the UK earlier this year. Fellows will be chosen by partner media organisations and will spend 8 weeks working on data-driven stories, new business models or prototypes for the newsrooms.
However, there a few key differences from fellowships we’ve launched in other countries worth mentioning.
First, we’ll be launching the programme with our largest ever group of media organisations, giving candidates a wide range of choices. We’ve also tried to ensure that newsrooms of all sizes, including regional newsrooms are represented in the programme. A healthy media ecosystem means that newsrooms of all types are empowered to take full advantage of the storytelling opportunities enabled by digital tools.
Second, we’ll be offering candidates two tracks: data journalist and developer. How news is produced, distributed, and consumed has changed tremendously in recent years. Increasingly, newsrooms need to equip themselves with a more robust set of technical skills. Journalists are also required to learn new tools for digital storytelling. In our conversations with editors-in-chief and media executives, we’ve heard a lot about the importance of journalists, developers, and designers working together as one team to fuel unique journalism.
Each participating media organisation has defined requirements and potential projects for each of their fellows, which fall into either the data journalist track or the developer track. Candidates can choose between the two tracks when submitting their application.
For our inaugural fellowship in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, we’ll be working with:
- Berliner Morgenpost, Berlin
- Blick, Zurich
- Correctiv, Berlin
- Der Standard, Vienna
- Die Presse, Vienna
- Express (DuMont), Cologne
- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Online, Frankfurt
- Kurier, Vienna
- Mittelbayerische Zeitung, Regensburg
- Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, Osnabrück
- Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich
- Rheinische Post, Düsseldorf
- Spiegel Online, Hamburg
- VOCER, Hamburg
- Wirtschaftswoche, Düsseldorf
- Zeit Online, Berlin
(You can learn more about each media organisation and their focus for the fellowship program here.)
These fellowships form an integral part of the Digital News Initiative (DNI), created a year ago as a forum for collaboration between Google and European publishers. The goal of the DNI is to support high quality journalism and empower innovation at the intersection of media and technology for a more sustainable media ecosystem. The vision for the fellowship is to support the development of a new generation of journalists and developers who stimulate this media ecosystem in the future. We can’t wait to see the fellows enter the 16 participating media organisations to work on innovative projects.
Candidates interested in the Google News Lab Fellowship in Germany, Austria and Switzerland can apply through our online form. For all information about the fellowship program visit newslab.withgoogle.com/fellowship-de.
Good luck to all candidates!
